The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has awarded a contract to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) to demonstrate the Air Force Research Lab’s “Agile Condor” capability using a MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) owned by GA-ASI.

The Agile Condor capability, will be integrated by GA-ASI over a 10-month period starting September.

GA-ASI will also undertake a flight demonstration phase to experiment with the Agile Condor payload to determine the optimum artificial intelligence and machine learning methodologies to find, identify and track select targets.

“The ability to autonomously fuse and interpret sensor data to determine targets of interest is at the forefront of unmanned systems technology,” said David R. Alexander, president, GA-ASI.

“The Agile Condor project will further enhance RPA effectiveness by specifically allowing a MQ-9 to surveil a large area of operations, autonomously identify pre-defined targets of interest and transmit their locations.”

Agile Condor is a high-performance computing architecture that will be used to demonstrate artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

The Agile Condor capability also has the potential to dramatically reduce satellite bandwidth requirements as a result of its ability to automatically identify, classify, and nominate targets of interest.

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